You can hear the whole song here if you're curious.
This song plays in a loop in my head every time I talk to someone who doesn't know their address. Which brings us to the number 1 most important thing you need to be able to tell me when you call 911. Where are you? If you can't say anything else but where you are, I can still get you help. If you don't know where you are? Well, I don't either. Neither does the firefighter, police officer or EMT. That can be bad news for you if say, something is on fire or you just cut off your own hand. Good luck handling that on your own.
There are a scary number of normal, functioning, adult members of society who have no idea what their address is. I find this disturbing. What do you do when you need to order a pizza?
Before cell phones, people calling 911 didn't necessary need to know their addresses. A 911 call placed from a landline phone gives us a read out on a screen that shows the address and phone number you're calling from. We'll still verify the information (all that information is entered by people at the phone company. Last I checked, phone company employees are human and can still make mistakes), but our read outs are correct probably 99% of the time.
Then came the wonderful invention of cell phones. A cell phone is mobile, of course! A wonderful invention! Now you can call grandma and hear all about her appendectomy from the comfort of the stands of Wrigley Field! Hooray! But since cell phones are mobile, us 911 operators no longer get a read out with the address on it. We get a read out showing where the nearest cell tower to your location is. This is incredibly useless information.
"Someone start medical for a guy who shot out his own eye with a BB gun! I don't know where he is but his cell phone is hitting the 6th Street tower." Right.
Some people know their addresses, but don't say them correctly. Strangely enough, the directional in your address is where it is for a reason.
For example: 123 S. Sesame St is completely different than 123 Sesame St S. In most of the cities 911 handles, both addresses are an option. And completely across town from one another. Lots of fun for the cops who like to go on long drives with their lights and sirens on, not so much fun for John Q. Citizen, who is watching the burglars make off with his prized collection of vintage Pez dispensers. John Q. Citizen will then call back and yell at me because I sent the officers to the wrong place. Fun!
Also, if you live in an apartment, the apartment is PART OF THE ADDRESS. Lots of people call and say they are at 123 Sesame St. So the officer gets there, and its an apartment complex. Do you think the officer is going to knock on every single door looking for you? If you said no, you get a cookie. At the most he'll try to call you and find out where you are. If he can't get through, he's going to mark it "unable to contact" or "gone on arrival", and get the hell out of dodge. The less paperwork he has to do, the better!
Also, lets talk about VOIP phones. VOIP is voice over internet protocol phone service, like Vonage. Besides cell phones, VOIP phones are the bane of any 911 operator's existence. When you sign up for VOIP, the phone company will ask for your address and type it in to show up on my screen when you call 911, just like a landline phone would. The problem is, many computers these days are portable. Every time you take your laptop somewhere, are you going to call your phone company and give them your new location? No? Then you're messing with my day. I had a call once from a guy several states away who needed police, stat. His VOIP read out showed me he was in the heart of our very biggest city. No problem. We have tons of police nearby. But when I confirmed the address with him, I learned he was calling from his laptop while he was on vacation several states away. Sorry, I don't have a transfer button for every police department in the nation. He ended up having to hang up with me, call 411 and ask for the phone number to the police department in the town he was visiting. You can imagine this would take an eternity in a situation where every second counts.
So really, the simplest thing you can do to help me help you, is know where you are. If you are traveling away from home, pay attention to your surroundings. Know what the name of the restaurant is. Know the nearest intersection. Learn which direction your house faces and the names of the nearest major streets. Which directions do the streets run? All this information could potentially save your life. And it will make my day much easier, which is, of course, almost as important.
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